The week in books

Exhausted parents will welcome the back-to-school feeling that is palpable in the air. September also heralds the busiest time for the children's book world, as publishers rush to get their new lists ready. Apart from the pre-Christmas period, publishers have their most lucrative time in September, buoyed by the new releases, post-holiday resolutions and textbook frenzy. Despite this frantic activity, it is a difficult time for publishers. The demise of the music industry hovers over the publishing houses like the ghost of Christmas yet to come. It's not only digitisation that is potentially troubling, but the fast and furious competition for discounting. Almost half a billion pounds was given away by the UK book trade in discounts last year, in a bid to tackle the long-held belief that books are just too expensive. They're practically giving them away.

And some publishers actually are. The charity Booktrust will, from the start of the autumn term, send more than 2 million free books to primary schools and secondary schools, through their Booktime and Booked Up projects, in a bid to encourage children to read for pleasure. The free books are provided with funding from the DCSF and publishers. The books will be given out to five year olds and 11 year olds through the schools, but not as part of any curricula or educational drive. By giving children the chance to choose one free book from a list of 12, the charity hopes to encourage independent readers, who make time for reading books of their own choosing.

As children's laureate, I can only praise this pioneering initiative. The short-term loss that the publisher incurs from giving the books away is negligible when compared with its lasting legacy of creating readers, and book buyers, of the future. Anthony Browne

Voting closes at noon on Tuesday in the poll to identify "the nation's favourite poet", a spin-off from the BBC's poetry season in the spring which has, it is fair to say, yet to catch the public imagination. Had the hustings actually taken place during the TV season, or the usual "celebrity advocates" been asked to endorse the bards, things might have been different; and an X Factor-style show featuring sexy actors playing Ted Hughes, say, or Dylan Thomas, reading their work to a baying audience and a judging panel made up of pop singers, starlets and one pedantic professor, could well have scored high ratings.

Seeking your support are 30 poets, of whom five are women - Wendy Cope, poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, Sylvia Plath, Christina Rossetti and Stevie Smith (below) - and six are living (Cope and Duffy along with Simon Armitage, Seamus Heaney, Roger McGough and Benjamin Zephaniah). Compiled in consultation with the Poetry Society and the Arts Council, the list doesn't allow you to pick Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marvell, Pope or Shelley - making it rather like a favourite monarch contest without Alfred, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I - but does include Ireland's Heaney and America's Sylvia Plath. Other notable omissions include Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the previous PL, Andrew Motion. Kipling and Wordsworth are front-runners by virtue of their records in favourite poem polls, but a little organisation by admirers of Duffy or Cope, or patriotic campaigns for Thomas or Robbie Burns, could easily swing it. Votes can be cast at bbc.co.uk/apps/ifl/poetryseason/captcha, and the result will be announced in October.John Dugdale